Tom Paine – an Englishman returned from twenty years abroad – blogs for liberty in Britain

Posts categorized "Current Affairs"

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

For the first time in decades I am optimistic we can win the battle of ideas against statists in general (difficult) and Leftists in particular (beginning to look easy). It will involve a journey that Jeremy Corbyn will never make; from the cosy mutual warmth of opposition, where all policies are theoretical and all consequences are optimistically imaginary, to the harsher land of reality.

We must avoid Corbyn's main error and engage with both doubters and opponents. We are true democrats; enemies of violence and no revolutionaries. We accept we must win votes from people of all walks of life. Our younger folk must be careful what they say and write in actual and virtual public, for it will be used against them if they ever run for office.

When we have no TruLib™ candidates in an election we must needs compromise by engaging and working with anyone whose policies are less hostile to our principles. They may be Hannanite Conservatives, Lbertarian-wing Kippers, Gladstonian LibDems or even John Mortimer or Frank Field-type Labourites. Most of my Labour-voting family and friends up North hate being bossed around by snooty people with meaningless degrees as much as we could wish – and are more likely to do something about it!

Voters for both Brexit and Trump transcended traditional divides of class, ethnicity and even sexual identity. If there is a single issue that unifies them, it is not ideological (though some ideologues will struggle with it more than us). It is really a matter of respect. They want their political "leaders" to stop condescending to them and taking them for granted. This is democracy. They are the demos. They want their supremacy acknowledged and their political servants to stop being uppity, distant and divorced from their everyday reality.

If your child's education is poor. If it takes you and your life partner's full-time effort to meet everyday expenses, you want your MP and your PM to be focussed on that, not on the "rights" of mongers of imaginary grievance. If you see a spoiled brat in college weeping, or a pop star bleating that all women are "in fear", because of the outcome of a free election, you expect your representatives to ignore them, or even laugh along with you, not take their fantasies seriously.

If I am right, this is therefore a dangerous historical tipping point. It's perfectly possible that the Left will be the first to figure this out. Watching them froth and rage at "ignorant, bigoted" proles like Empire Loyalist colonels of the 1950s I grant you it seems bloody unlikely at present, but it's a risk.

If we are to engage with the ordinary voters who have better things to do or needs too urgent to address than to have time to obsess about politics, we must speak to their concerns in their language. They have seen through the warped words of the Left at last and this gives us an advantage to be seized and exploited – or lost.

Reading like-minded blogs, I think we have learned at least one thing in the long dismal night of the Left. We understand better than most how they warp language itself to serve their ends. I will address that in my next posts.

Saturday, November 19, 2016

In the wake of Brexit and Trump, I am becoming a little tired of all the accusations of hatred and division being thrown at those who voted the "wrong way". Leftists are utter hypocrites when they use these words of their opponents.

Their ideology deliberately sets people against each other by class, ethnic group, gender and sexual identity. Markets don't give a stuff about any of that and nor do employers. They only care if a given individual, regardless of skin tone and reproductive apparatus, has some economic value to add and is prepared to show up to do it.

Show me a shrieking hater divisively accusing others and I will show you a leftist. When they scream that anyone who opposes them is a hater, they are projecting. When they complain about division, they unintentionally reveal that the only way to have unity in their terms is to agree with every word they say. That same totalitarian tendency leads their intellectuals to "no platform" their opponents.

They're obsessed with hatred and division precisely because theirs is a hateful doctrine predicated upon social division. Without setting one group in society against another, they can never win or keep power. Which is why when they're in power the hatred and division never goes away.

It is time to call them out on their dishonesty. They are not the principled, ethical people they virtue signal themselves to be. That are not kindly or idealistic. They foment envy, hatred and division selfishly to give themselves the chance to live without producing.

Politics is show business for ugly people. Leftism is economics for parasites.

Monday, November 14, 2016

The right-on Conservative in name only, Matthew Paris, has the gall to ask openly the question in the hearts of treacherous metropolitan élitists across the Free World. It's not an easy question to answer because it depends on:

How trusting he is. In my experience an inclination to trust is a good indicator that a person is himself trustworthy. If you see your fellow men as a threat it's often because — given the opportunities presented by power — you would be a threat to them.

How prepared he is to compromise. I kept working, contributing to the greater good and taking care of my family for decades while people who despised me and had contempt for my values rewrote every rule to shave slices off my liberty. They packed the judiciary, subverted the command structure of the police and staffed academia with their lackeys. They sought to cow me into submission with abuse and denormalise my ethics. With the tables turned, can Mr Parris keep calm and carry on as I did? Can he assume his political opponents are well intentioned even as we dismantle his orthodoxies?

I don't know the answer to these questions. I can however ever be certain of this. The people can't trust Matthew Parris.

Wednesday, November 09, 2016

Donald Trump's win in the US presidential election tells us something. It's hard to be certain what that something is — apart from the fact that opinion polls, even now exit polls, have an inherent left wing bias. Perhaps because conservative voters now seem to delight in lying to them

The American people have rejected the political establishment. Those of us who oppose that establishment therefore have grounds to celebrate. We should take a happy moment to revel in the discomfiture of our enemies and certainly shed no tears for the corrupt Clinton clan, but our celebrations should be muted and perhaps tinged with fear.

During the BBC News live coverage one of the pundits said that, in a sense, this was a contest between two New York Democrats. Mr Trump was a contributor to the Clintons in the past. Like the Democrats, he is a man who speaks of government in terms of power. He is certainly no Ronald Reagan.

His answers to his nation's problems involve more government, not less. The free market would not "build that wall". The free market is pulling in the people he wants it to keep out! He has promised the people of Detroit that he will rebuild the automotive industry there just at the point when free markets are reshaping it in a disruptive and possibly lethal way.

As a businessman, he may be expected to be sympathetic to the concerns of American business. That is not necessarily a good thing. Although our socialist opponents often mistakenly condemn us as capitalist lackeys, classical liberals favour markets, not businesses. From Adam Smith onwards we have understood that greed is not good unless guided by the invisible hand of the market.

Trump's track record in business does not fill me with optimism. This is a man more inclined to suck up to and donate to politicians to win support for his projects than to focus on what his customers want. He has shown what he thinks politicians are for in a crony capitalist system. God help America if that is a predictor of how he will perform as a politician.

Mr Trump plans to restrict competition to benefit favoured American businesses. That is why he has won the support of unionised blue-collar workers in rustbelt states. In the boardrooms of American big businesses this morning they will be calculating how to use him to channel taxpayers money to them.

There are some positives. He studied economics at Wharton, which — combined with the fact that he has never lived directly as a parasite on the public purse — makes him more qualified in that respect than most leaders. At least it should make him unlikely to say stupid things like Mutti Merkel when she claimed that politics should have primacy over markets.

His election may signal the death of political correctness, freeing Americans to talk honestly about such problems as race relations. That is the essential first step to solving them and would never have happened under a forked-tongue Clinton presidency. On the contrary Clinton would have stoked the imaginary grievances of the Black Lives Matter agitators. Trump thinks climate change is a fraud and while I disagree I am happy his view will stop America committing economic suicide by the kind of crazed overreaction to it Greens and other anticapitalists favour.

In foreign policy terms, he will end the freeloading of nations like France and Germany which have failed to contribute enough to the defence of the West. We can only hope he will prove the correct response to Putin's devious geopolitics is plain speaking. Putin may fabricate invitations from Russian speaking populations for "assistance", but Mr Trump will call them what they are – invasions. How he will respond to them is another matter however. He has already made the first major mistake of his presidency by saying during the campaign that he would be selective in deciding which NATO members to defend.

US voters have punched professional machine politicians in the teeth and they were right to do so. This is a therefore a good morning for Western democracy. It remains to be seen whether it's as good for the leadership of the West.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Following the current political debates on both sides of the Atlantic is discouraging for those who like to believe (or perhaps delude ourselves) that our opinions are guided by reason. The unpleasant tactics of the US Presidential campaign provide much fuel for cynicism. As someone opposed to the big state policies of Clinton, Trump and (in Britain) May I tend to welcome anything that promotes cynicism about politics but I am also always concerned that if it goes too far there is the risk of something even worse than we have.

Clinton has been caught employing agitators to foment violence at Trump events. Trump suggests the election is rigged and suggests he might not accept the outcome. Every day the same events are used by both sides to justify their own partisan view. Facts don't seem to be determining opinions. Opinions seem to be shaping facts. Meanwhile back in quiet old Britain, our politicians are contorting themselves to suggest that in voting to leave the EU the British people did not intend to leave its central institution — the single market.

Our democracy is in danger because we have overloaded the concept of democracy itself. In the 19th Century when government was a much smaller player in society; controlling perhaps 5% of GDP and performing limited functions the electorate had merely to choose suitable people. It was more difficult than identifying the necessary skills in candidates when choosing a dog catcher, but it was a similar exercise. Now that we are choosing people to make choices for us in every aspect of our lives; even the pronouns we use when addressing each other, in the case of Canadians at the moment, who is to say what criteria to apply? Many agree with me, I suspect, that anyone attracted to such control over fellow humans is by definition unworthy.

A key problem with democracy in a boundless state is understanding what the people mean when they vote. Some will vote for Trump next month because they believe him to have the skills and ethics to be a good president. Others will vote mischievously to shake up the Establishment and specifically the leadership of the Republican Party. Some will vote Clinton because they believe her a sincere, talented and experienced person suited to the office of POTUS. Others think her an appalling crook but will vote for her to keep out Trump.

I think politics has always been "post truth". Take Harold Wilson's "the pound in your pocket" speech for example. There was no glorious age of honest politicians. There was only a state modest enough in scope and scale for the winner of the electoral lying contest not to matter so much.

As things now stand, the intent of the electorate is rarely clear. The choice between Clinton or Trump will be driven — as the choice between Leave or Remain was driven — by loose, accidental alliances of people voting for different and often contradictory reasons. So the winner of any election in the West now gets to write his or her own mandate. We can see that in our own recent change of PM. Cameron had a mandate to do x, y and z. May believes she has a mandate to do a,b and c. Both mandates are based on the same votes by the same people in response to the same circumstances and the same manifesto.

In truth we are just appointing a master to rule us. The only restraint on his choices is his fear of what we might do next time. If an opposition implodes, as Labour has done in Britain and the Republicans in the US, then that fear is removed. If faith in democratic parties fades (as they richly deserve, alas) then the field may even be opened for undemocratic or anti-democratic players.

We are in interesting times and dangerous ones. Our votes are open to wide interpretation. Clegg and Soubry are busy demonstrating shamefully just how wide. Trump or Clinton will soon be proclaiming their absolute right to do whatever the hell they choose on the basis of a reading of the electoral runes that will make soothsaying seem scientific. Yet still most of us seem to believe that if only the quality of politicians could be improved all would be well. We are waiting for a hero, when frankly — given the powers we have allowed politicians to accumulate — nothing could be more dangerous.

Sunday, October 09, 2016

I have never favoured the view that elected officials need be just like us. Ideally, given the scope of the responsibilities of those leading what is regrettably the most powerful and dangerous force in our society, it is desirable that they be unusual.

Most importantly they would (unlike most of us) find economics interesting. Or at least they would be prepared to give it — as a scientific attempt to analyse human behaviours — primacy over how they would like to think the world should be. Angela Merkel with her "primacy of politics over economics" just reminds me of Douglas Adams' marble sculpted teacup held in the air by the superiority of art over physics. Without the laugh.

Scientific detachment, a non-corrupt desire to serve the public, a healthy sense of inadequacy to a task never yet successfully undertaken and a humble awareness that, even ignoring wars, government is the leading non-natural cause of death. These should be differences enough. We are not entitled to expect our politicians to be moral paragons. Indeed I think it would dangerous if they were.

Many a normal man has lusted after an attractive woman when his social commitments and/or hers dictated otherwise. And, let's not be sexist here, vice versa. Some are too moral to act on their desires. Some are not brave enough and call their cowardice morality. Few are vulgar enough to share them with third parties. Even fewer are near live microphones if they do. So I don't really understand the fuss about the Trump tape. Neither his vulgarity nor his undiplomatic openness about his fleshly desires were anyway in doubt.

I therefore think he was unwise to apologise for it because he has now accepted a higher standard of behaviour than he is likely to have lived up to generally given his colourful sexual history.

People are driven to power, fame and fortune very largely because they give access to more and more attractive sexual partners and (as Rupert Murdoch demonstrates) for longer. As long as all partners are consenting adults, there's no particular harm in that. Anything lawful and non-violent that fires the ambition of the productive is good, whether it's the desire to bed a looker, own a Picasso or fund a cure for AIDS. Without such ambitions the successful would all retire quietly on their first million and most great endeavours would falter.

If there is a moral dimension to it, it says as much of the sexual partners attracted by power, money and fame as it does of those using it to attract. It certainly does not speak of the moral superiority of one sex over the other as a chap I know who moved jobs because of a female supervisor's demand for sexual favours as part of his appraisal would attest.

Trump has the same appetites and attitudes as America's favourite president, JFK. President Kennedy however used the FBI to bring women to him and had the G-men threaten them with dire consequences if they told. Bill Clinton idolised JFK and strove to emulate him. The FBI being unwilling it was up to Hillary Clinton to threaten Bill's women with consequences. I do not say she approved of them, but she seems to have been a knowing and thorough accomplice after the repeated seedy fact. Nor does she seem to have thought Bill's behaviours disqualified him from office. She has, as the lawyers say, no locus standi on this issue.

It is in our interests for our political leaders to be flawed. We no longer expect them not to have smoked weed, committed sexual indiscretions nor held silly views in their youth precisely because a Cromwell — true to his Puritanical principles — will get you into far worse trouble than a leader who can picture himself in the place of your tempted, weak self. As we are about to find out with a prig of a vicar's daughter in Number 10.

There are lots of reasons not to vote for Donald Trump. His utter ignorance of economics, for example. His lack of affection for either (it's hard to tell) the truth or reality, for another. But this story teaches us nothing new or surprising about him.

Monday, June 13, 2016

The Orlando massacre tells us nothing about the killer save that he was insane, but it's telling us a lot about ourselves.

Just look at the politicians warning of islamophobia. The people virtue-signalling on Facebook. The triggered leftist storming off British TV because he thought the discussion was focussing on the terrorism angle rather than the hatred of gays. Donald Trump turning the horror to predictable political advantage. Give it a day and the gun control advocates will be complaining about the ease of buying weapons in America and the NRA will be calling for more heavily-armed homosexuals. Plus ça change...

We need to learn lessons but for that we need to open our minds. Every comment I have read so far is someone seizing on a new event as proof of the correctness of old ideas and the continuing wickedness of old adversaries.

If facts don't change our minds what is the point of having them? We might as well all curl up in a corner and live in our deranged imaginations whatever life we fancy. Or to take my ambiguous question the other way, why have minds if facts don't change them?

Monday, May 23, 2016

I don't share the general pessimism of my age group about the millennial generation. The Misses Paine are millenials. They are serious intellectuals, hard-working women who want to make a contribution to the world they live in and generally fine human beings. So are all their friends that I have had the pleasure to meet. I would go so far as to say that the millennials I know (admittedly a sample limited by my daughters' excellent taste and my former profession) are more sober, hard-working and serious than I was at their age.

In the wake of 2008, many millennials are having a much tougher time than the late Mrs Paine and I did at the beginning of our working lives. We walked, debt-free, out of university straight into employment. We earned enough to leave our parents' homes and pay our frugal way. We were able to marry at 23, rent a crappy flat for a couple of years and buy our first modest home. Neither of us were unemployed until we chose to be. We worked hard, took things seriously and struggled at times, but our lives look golden in retrospect compared to the struggles of the average millennial.

Nor do I join the Daily Mail and today The Times on reviewing this report (actually about post-millennials currently at university but I suspect reflecting similar beliefs), in fearing for them ideologically. They are not a political bloc any more than our generation was. They are socially liberal but they are also sceptical of politicians' promises to fix their economic problems. Some go so far as to criticise previous generations for having voted themselves unfunded benefits, incurring massive government debts now dumped on them. They are right. They have been screwed.

To the extent that they have scarily illiberal ideas, I think the interesting question is why? Based on my daughters' experiences at British universities, I blame lecturers of my generation. We may have won the debate in 1970s student politics about "No platform for fascists and racists" on a pure free speech argument. But then most of us on the winning side went into productive work and many of the "no platform" losers went into academia. They have indoctrinated subsequent students to the point where only 27% of them (and only 22% of women) believe that "Universities should never limit free speech".

Some of this is simple confusion about the difference between good laws and good manners. Laws should only prohibit real harms, which do not include hurt feelings. I might ban from my circle of friends someone who went off on a racist or anti-Semitic rant, but I would not call the police. Universities can make their own rules, just like me at my dinner table. But the consequences are very different because they are rather more important fora for intellectual debate.

If students are not prepared to confront the ideas they dislike in the comfort and relative safety of a university lecture hall, how are they going to deal with them in the real world? And what, whisper it softly, if some of the ideas they hate turn out to be right?

Leftists have divided society into a hierarchy of victim groups entitled to dismiss the views of their supposed oppressors. But in the tradition mocked in "Life of Brian" when the Judean Peoples Front fought the Peoples Front of Judea, they have also allowed their zealotry to divide them in frankly hilarious ways.

Feminists like Germaine Greer are now banned from campuses because of remarks like her infamous "transphobic" observation that;

Just because you lop off your penis and then wear a dress doesn't make you a ******* woman. I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat but that won’t turn me into a ******* cocker spaniel.

An interesting phenomenon in this context is the emergence of the "licensed dissident." The only people who can easily challenge illiberal views are those from the Left's pantheon of the oppressed who as Milo Yiannopoulos puts it, "go off the ideological reservation". Hence the importance of his "Dangerous Faggot Tour" of American campuses in which he systematically "triggers" the "spoilt brat rich kid social justice warriors" and exposes their idiocy by posting videos of their screaming on YouTube.

It's ideology pretending to be scholarship. It's propaganda pretending to be fact.

Milo is even more amusingly forthright on that topic and more seriously says in the course of the discussion;

The violence is coming not from the right but from the left and it is informed and justified in the minds of activists by this zealotry.

Yes, I see millennials behaving as absurdly as my leftist contemporaries but I also see them arguing against such absurdities with great verve and skill. I also hope that soon the effects of 2008 will be behind them so they can start to earn properly and pay more taxes. Nothing produces economic liberals faster than excessive tax. So, once again, and perhaps to my own surprise I am on the side of optimism.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

A Muslim extremist linked to Woolwich killer Michael Adebowale was jailed for five years and four months today (Weds) for glorifying the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in a series of YouTube videos. Royal Barnes, 23, was filmed by his veiled wife Rebekah Dawson, 22, laughing hysterically as he drove past the scene of the attack. Dawson, who has caused nationwide controversy by refusing to remove her niqab in court, was jailed for one year and eight months. The couple ridiculed the memorial flowers left by friends, family and members of the public for Drummer Rigby and Barnes described the murder as 'absolutely brilliant'. Dawson also boasted in a text to a friend: 'Did you watch it? It was really inciting and almost glorifying lol.'

Two young idiots upload stupid films to YouTube. They express primitive, ignorant, violent opinions. Opinions rather like those expressed by revolutionary socialists every single day (but with far less chance of influencing anyone).

Did their childish, ignorant words represent a threat? If so, then we are a feeble society too decadent to deserve survival. This is using the sledgehammer of the criminal law to crack something that merited the toffee hammer of an Anglo-Saxon imprecation at best.

These idiots are pathetic, yes. But so are we for having nothing better to do with the hard-earned money taken by force from decent people than to pay policemen, lawyers, judges and prison officers to deal with them. And for not understanding that it's better to hear dangerous opinions and know where threats may come from than to drive them underground.

Tuesday, March 04, 2014

I have nothing constructive to say on Ukraine. You may imagine, given my years living in Moscow where this blog began, and given the news from former colleagues in my old firm's Kiev office, that I am pretty depressed by the news.

I have spent my years since I left Russia telling people to forget what they thought they knew and believe in the future of a cultured, civilised and friendly people. I still believe that's what they are, but their system for choosing leaders - and restraining them once they are chosen - seems to be as catastrophic as ever it was.

Whatever else Vladimir Putin thinks he is up to, he has restored every thuggish stereotype of Russia in an instant. Time will tell if the Cold War is back, but there's no doubt now that Francis Fukuyama made a major fool of himself when he published this book.

The BBC is reporting that Putin has said there is no need to send in troops yet. They are of course already there, but Russia and the West are pretending they are not; each for its own reasons. My favourite miliblogger, Sean Linnane, clarifies that for us, commenting;

Always some guy in the unit who can't figure out what "sterile" fatigues means

Before Russia I lived in Poland for eleven years and you can imagine how many "I told you so's" I am hearing from my friends there. I apologise publicly to those I called paranoid about Russia. Przepraszam.

Amid those communications however came one Polish joke about what's going on. Enjoy! (click to enlarge)

Translation: In view of the situation in the Ukraine, France has surrendered.